Faculty in four grad programs get top-10 ranking

Jan. 9, 2008

KALAMAZOO--Faculty members in four Western Michigan University
graduate programs have earned top-10 rankings in an annual listing
of research universities with the most productive faculty.

The third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index ranks
per-capita scholarly accomplishment by discipline at the nation's
research universities. WMU's science education faculty ranked
third in their discipline in the index, while the graduate faculty
in educational evaluation and research, counselor education,
and applied economics ranked seventh, ninth and 10th, respectively.

The data for the ranking is based on the number of books and
journal articles written by faculty, the number of times their
work is cited by other scholars, and the awards, honors and grant
dollars they have received. The index rates the output of 164,843
faculty members in nearly 7,300 doctoral programs at 375 universities
offering doctoral degrees.

For three of the four WMU graduate programs cited--science
education, counselor education and applied economics--WMU is
the only Michigan school in the top 10. In the fourth category,
educational evaluation and research, WMU shares top-10 honors
with Michigan State University.

The index is published by Academic Analytics, a Pennsylvania-based,
for-profit organization owned in part by the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. The third edition of the index was
issued in late 2007, and results of the analysis were widely
reported in higher education media, including the Chronicle of
Higher Education.

The index was originally designed as a tool that universities
could purchase and use to compare programs at peer institutions.
Results of the first index were not made public. The second index
did not include any WMU programs, but the expanded data of the
third index brought the four WMU programs into top-10 positions.